Some early female detectives are featured this week on BBC Radio 7: American author Anna Katharine Green's socialite Violet Strange in "The Golden Slipper" (1915) and British writer Catherine Louisa Pirkis's Loveday Brooke in "The Redhill Sisterhood" (1893). Go here for the schedule or to listen.
There's not much mystery related to report from Bloomsbury's April 2nd bibliophile auction. The Leslie Charteris books featuring Simon Templar, aka The Saint—Trust the Saint, Saint Overboard, and The Saint on the Spanish Main—went unsold. There were a few Ian Fleming titles that did respectably: A first edition of From Russia, with Love, £320 (approximately $470); a first edition of Goldfinger, £300 (approximately $440); copies of Octopussy and The Living Daylights, signed (respectively) by Maud Adams and Maryam D'Abo (who appeared in the respective films), £280 (approximately $411).
Featured this week on BBC Radio 7: Agent Zigzag, about ex-con and British World War II double agent Eddie Chapman (whose story was dramatized in 1966's Triple Cross, starring Christopher Plummer) and G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown; plus Russell Thorndike's swashbuckling vicar Doctor Syn rides again in The Further Adventures of Doctor Syn. Go here for the schedule or to listen.
Katherine Neville, best known as author of the multifaceted thriller The Eight (1989), was born today in St. Louis in 1945. The Fire, her follow up to The Eight, was published in 2008. Other works include A Calculated Risk (1992) and The Magic Circle (1998).
Jeff Prucher, of the Hugo-winning Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, provides on the Oxford University Press blog "Nine Words You Might Think Came from Science but Which Are Really from Science Fiction." I love the fact that Dave Gerrold (of Star Trek's "The Trouble with Tribbles") first linked the word virus with nasty computer programs in 1972.
Overlook Press, which has reprinted Charles Portis's True Grit with an afterword by novelist Donna Tartt, reports that the Coen brothers are planning to remake this classic western (Adam Sandler had better not be cast as the legendary lawman. Is Sam Elliott available?).
The waspish novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and critic Andrew Lang, best known for editing various volumes of fairy tales (The Blue Fairy Book, etc.), was born today in Selkirk, Scotland, in 1844. His prodigious literary activities include angering his countrymen in Pickle the Spy (1897) when he proved that a Scottish nobleman once spied for the British (gasp!); cowriting The World's Desire (1890) with
The legendary Triple Crown champion Secretariat, the winner of the 1973 Belmont by 31 lengths, was born today in 1970 in Virginia and lived to be 19 years old. One of his many descendants is Kentucky Derby winner Smarty Jones. To see the performances of "Big Red" in the Preakness and the Belmont, go here and here.
Julia Jones's The Adventures of Margery Allingham has been reissued with new information (who knew that Allingham's husband Philip Youngman Carter had a child with another woman?). Here is a brief review from the Independent.
Recently on CBC Radio's The Next Chapter, Cuban expatriate Jose Latour talked about his thriller Crime of Fashion, Gail Bowen discussed her new novel The Brutal Heart, and Peter Robinson addressed questions such as "What's your greatest fear?", "Who is your favorite hero of fiction?," and "Who are your favorite writers?" (It looks like the March 21st program with Agatha winner Louise Penny won't be available until March 28th).
Over on Alan Hewer's very cool Web site of dust jackets from the World War I era, some items of interest are John Buchan's Mr. Standfast (1919); Marie Belloc Lowndes's spy tale Out of the War (1918); and a whole page devoted to Sapper, including some Bulldog Drummond covers.
An absorbing book has proved to be Penguin Special (2005), by Jeremy Lewis, about Allen Lane and the evolution of Penguin Books. Lane, a distant cousin of The Bodley Head cofounder John Lane, went to work at The Bodley Head at age sixteen, eventually running the firm after the elder Lane's death. The firm went into receivership after Allen Lane founded Penguin.
masses would be so controversial, but his fellow publishers, such as Jonathan Cape and Stanley Unwin, were convinced that Lane would go down in flames. Lewis well captures Lane's maverick, somewhat enigmatic personality, both in terms of his choices about what to publish and his refusal to back causes that more activist colleagues advocated, although he stood firm when prosecuted for publishing the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover. Bonuses in the book are portraits of the colorful publishers of the time (such as the leftist Victor Gollancz and the "lunatic" Walter Hutchinson) and early supporters (such as George Bernard Shaw).
Over on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's First Tuesday Book Club is a request for nominations for the most powerful or moving fictional characters, which is slated as the subject of a future program.
In addition, the First Tuesday Book Club has an archived list of recommended reads in crime fiction—not a lot of surprises, methinks, with the possible exception of American Horace McCoy, who is best known for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935), but also was a hardboiled writer of considerable skill.
